By @alex
With a bit of time and effort, this power can be yours:
“Grand Theft Astro”, the game in the above video, was created 100% through wishing. This document will break down a recipe for getting started with something similar, wish-by-wish.
Here’s the wish that gets the project started:
<aside> 💡
Create a game called "City Walk". There should be a 1000x1000 ground plane with a tiling asphalt texture in a pixelated, Minecraft style. The player should control a Minecraft-style character with cuboid arms, legs, torso and head, which walks in a proper animated cycle. The player uses the arrow keys, WASD, or an on-screen joystick to move around. A key light above the ground plane casts shadows. No game objective yet other than exploring.
</aside>
This is a mouthful, but it’s a good boiler plate for getting a 3D sandbox-style experience off the ground. Note that you may want to run a few parallel copies of the wish and pick the best one; I find the AI usually does a decent job getting this far, but some attempts are definitely better than others and it’s worth holding out for the best of the batch.
Note: Astrocade doesn’t currently “support” 3D, but it’s a limitation we can easily circumvent. In the above wish, for instance, we never directly say “create a 3D sandbox environment” or “create a first-person perspective game”, both of which might trigger the AI’s detection of supposedly-unsupported genres.
Notice that even my mockup suggests the AI has already gotten the hint and is making something in 3D:
And here’s what we get! It’s extremely rough and obviously far from complete, but we’ve succeeded in getting a simple 3D sandbox up and running. The player can move around, a Minecraft-style asphalt texture is visible, and, in further Minecraft fashion, the player is blocky but smoothly animates and can walk anywhere within the scene.
As is often the case, the game starts out with a lot of unnecessary UI. Let’s remove all that:
<aside> 💡
Get rid of the "City Walk" text, the "Play" button, the info and settings/gear buttons, and the gradient at the top of the screen. The game does not yet any kind of UI, so clear it all.
</aside>
Ironically, by the way, it gave me a ton of crap I didn’t ask for but failed to add the very simple joystick needed to play the game on mobile. 😅 Oh well. We can add that later.
Before we can start building on this foundation, though, we need to review a couple basic concepts and figure out a key detail about our scene.